India Carefully Watching Political Crisis

December 30, 2007|By Laurie Goering Chicago Tribune

NEW DELHI — India is watching the deepening political crisis in Pakistan with mixed feelings.

As a nation with its own long history of painful political assassinations, there is a degree of empathy with Pakistan's anguish but also a real sense of satisfaction that its longtime political rival is foundering.

Underneath, there is also increasing worry about what a destabilized Pakistan means for India, the nation with perhaps the most to gain or lose - apart from Pakistan itself - from how its nuclear-armed neighbor's political crisis plays out.

Concerned that deepening political unrest in Pakistan could spill across the border, particularly in the form of terrorist attacks, India's national security committee met Friday and suspended bus and train links to Pakistan and put the military on high alert. The transportation connections, reopened in recent years, have often been cited as the strongest evidence of slowly warming Indian-Pakistan relations.

But Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi and editor of the South Asia Intelligence Review, said unrest in Pakistan is likely to cut terrorist attacks in India as Islamist militants in Pakistan's lawless border area with Afghanistan for the moment focus their attention on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and other political figures.

Similarly, as Pakistan's government tries to combat emboldened extremists in the country, it has had to pull troops back from traditional conflict zones such as Kashmir and along the India-Pakistan border. Fewer Pakistani troops stationed near Indian troops, Sahni said, automatically reduces conflicts.

For the first time in 17 years, he said, the number of fatalities from all causes in hotly disputed Kashmir dropped below 1,000 in 2007, he said, calling it a "tremendous gain" for peace in the region.

However, unrest in Pakistan is hardly good news for India in the long run, Sahni said. If armed Islamic fundamentalist groups manage to win control of significant areas of Pakistan and aren't facing significant military pressure from Pakistan's government, they could use those gains as a base to expand their attacks, he said.